I can no longer recommend MailChimp

Re:I can no longer recommend MailChimp by civilian on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @06:27PM (#15597156)

Yup, the "Spam" button is a true signal. A company I worked for had problems with the number of times people hit 'spam' on the emails (not even a newsletter, but transactional emails), and AWS SimpleEmailService put us on probation. I got to write a worker task that would consume the queue of "someone marked you as spam" from SES and remove them from our email list.

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Re:I can no longer recommend MailChimp by austinjp on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @07:52PM (#15597777)

Forgive the naivety, can you explain a little? From what I understand from this:

You sent emails from AWS to subscribers.

Some recipients hit the spam button in Gmail.

You received a message for every email that had been flagged as spam, including the recipient details.

Is that correct? What exactly happens when I hit the spam button in Gmail?

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Re:I can no longer recommend MailChimp by BillinghamJ on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @08:01PM (#15597829)

Yes that’s correct. Email senders are informed when you mark email as spam so they can add you to an unsubscribe list automatically.

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Re:I can no longer recommend MailChimp by austinjp on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @04:47AM (#15599623)

This is very odd. I thought the "mark as spam" button was entirely within Gmail. I had no idea it sent a message to the email sender. Is this standard? It seems counter productive, since it confirms the spam was received. I want it to fail silently and disappear forever.

What should I be doing, to achieve silent spam disposal within Gmail?

I hope I don't have to set filters myself, that would defeat the entire purpose of a smart system that learns to recognise spam.

Edit: we're talking about "mark as spam", not "unsubscribe", right?

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Re:I can no longer recommend MailChimp by BillinghamJ on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @04:54AM (#15599652)

Yep.

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Re:I can no longer recommend MailChimp by flukus on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @08:19PM (#15597926)

Sounds like an easy way to verify active email addresses.

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Re:I can no longer recommend MailChimp by civilian on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @11:38PM (#15598649)

It is! But it's better just to check the SES queue for "email was delivered".

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Re:I can no longer recommend MailChimp by BillinghamJ on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @04:55AM (#15599654)

Yeah the SMTP protocol handles verification of mailbox existence already.

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Re:I can no longer recommend MailChimp by tyingq on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @09:03PM (#15598165)

Gmail parses the email for an unsubscribe link and asks if you want to unsubscribe. If you say yes, it follows the link for you.

See this: https://lifehacker.com/5319723/gmail-offers-to-automatically...

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Re:I can no longer recommend MailChimp by austinjp on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @04:43AM (#15599605)

Yes, although I'm asking about marking spam, not unsubscribing.

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Re:I can no longer recommend MailChimp by tyingq on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @07:35AM (#15600284)

That's when Gmail prompts you...when you initially mark it as spam.

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Re:I can no longer recommend MailChimp by jlgaddis on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @11:44PM (#15598671)

The next time you get such an e-mail, look through the headers (available via "Show Original" in Gmail, IIRC) for a "List-Unsubscribe:" header.

This value will usually be an HTTP URL (it can also be a "mailto:"). That (unique) URL (which is tied to your e-mail address) is then followed in order to unsubscribe you from the list.

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Re:I can no longer recommend MailChimp by mook on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @09:16PM (#15598224)

Apologies, I'm a little confused. How would a transactional email put somebody into a mailing list so that they could be removed? Shouldn't they not be in the list in the first place?

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Re:I can no longer recommend MailChimp by civilian on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @10:06PM (#15598383)

The transactional email wasn't adding someone to a newsletter. But you can mark 'spam' on any email at all, and some people felt that our anniversary-of-them-signing-up emails or "you've had a problem being billed" emails were spam, so they hit the button. idk man! People are crazy.

We also had marketing emails through mailchimp, but they were totally separate systems.

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Re:I can no longer recommend MailChimp by mook on Wednesday November 01, 2017 @02:28AM (#15599179)

Ah. I'd have marked the former as spam too (it's an advertisement reminding the recipient you exist, not something in response to a transaction just committed / something they did), but the latter seems plenty safe.

But then, I have no idea how you'd be correlate the transactional mail to the marketing mails anyway (I'd use separate addresses for that). If somebody added my address to a list I didn't sign up for, any mail from them would just be a reminder they did so... It wouldn't be hard to imagine somebody marking everything in the future as spam automatically after glancing at the sender name.

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